The Most Organised Person I Know

Imagine opening your laptop and knowing exactly what needs doing today. No mental scrambling, no forgotten tasks, no nagging feeling you've missed something important. Imagine an email system where messages don't pile up creating dread, but move through clear pathways: Action for things you'll do, Read for things you'll consume, Pending for things you're waiting on. Imagine a shared shopping list where both you and your partner can add items the moment you notice you're running low, so nobody's carrying the entire household in their head. This isn't fantasy. It's what happens when you build systems that work with real life. I've spent years developing frameworks that let me worry less and live better. Not complicated systems requiring daily maintenance and perfect discipline. Just practical structures that keep working when you're tired, overwhelmed, or life gets messy. This book teaches you the SPACE framework: five principles that show up in every organisation system that survives contact with reality. Systems get tasks out of your head so your brain can think instead of store. Preparation means small investments now that save massive time later. Awareness shows you the gap between what you think you're doing and what's actually happening. Curation protects white space by teaching you to default to 'no' so you have room for what matters. Evolution accepts that systems break when life changes, and adjusting them isn't failure. These aren't steps you complete once. They're a continuous loop you move through as circumstances shift. You'll get my exact systems with permission to adapt them completely. Task management using whatever tool you prefer. Email workflows that process messages instead of accumulating them. Shared household systems that distribute the remembering, not just the doing. Weekly reviews taking 30 minutes that actually prevent things falling through cracks. Boundaries you can hold without guilt spirals. The book includes techniques you can implement immediately: task triage for cutting through decision paralysis, the never-miss-twice rule for building habits that compound, time audits revealing where your 168 hours actually go, keyboard shortcuts that save hundreds of hours over a career, and retrospectives that teach you what's working. Here's what matters: organisation creates infrastructure for choice. Without systems, you're constantly reacting, trying to remember, mentally running through lists while you're supposed to be present with your kid or focused on work. With them, you can trust that nothing's falling through the cracks while you're fully engaged with what's in front of you. The book also covers what I call the human layer—mental health, time in nature, authentic relationships, holding boundaries—because these aren't optional. They're load-bearing walls. No system survives if you're ignoring your actual human needs. Written for freelancers managing multiple clients, parents drowning in household admin, small business owners wearing all the hats, neurodivergent brains that benefit from external structure, and anyone who's tried and abandoned productivity systems because they were too rigid or stopped working when life got chaotic. It's principles over platforms throughout, so these ideas work with whatever tools you actually use: Notion, Trello, Google Keep, paper notebooks, whatever you reach for when things get busy. You're not broken. You don't need another app. You need systems designed for how you actually live, that create space for what matters, that let you be present instead of constantly preoccupied. This is how you make space. This is how you keep it.